CAIRO — As violent clashes roiled Egypt, looters made away with a prized 3,500-year-old limestone statue, ancient beaded jewelry and more than 1,000 other artifacts in the biggest theft to hit an Egyptian museum in living memory.The scale of the looting of the Malawi Museum in the southern Nile River city of Minya laid bare the security vacuum that has taken hold in cities outside Cairo, where police have all but disappeared from the streets. It also exposed how bruised and battered the violence has left Egypt.For days after vandals ransacked the building Wednesday, there were no police or soldiers in sight as groups of teenage boys burned mummies and broke limestone sculptures too heavy for the thieves to carry away. The security situation remained precarious Monday as gunmen atop nearby buildings fired on a police station near the museum....

BUCHAREST, Romania — A Romanian museum official says some of the paint pigments recovered from an oven of a woman whose son is charged with stealing seven multimillion-dollar paintings in the Netherlands contain chemicals from colors used in the 19th and 20th century, but aren’t commonly used anymore.Forensic scientists at Romania’s National History Museum examined ash from the stove of Olga Dogaru, whose son is the chief suspect in last year’s theft of paintings, which include a Matisse, a Picasso and a Monet.Authorities said Dogaru initially admitted burning the paintings to protect her son, but later denied it....

Henry Porter is a writer and journalist specialising in liberty and civil rights.The inscription carved into the huge beech tree, which stands on a hill path in Gloucestershire, reads PM 10/9/13 MKN. Next month, this piece of vandalism – though I cannot see it as that now – will be 100 years old, which seems incredible for something probably done on the spur of the moment. I often wonder about PM and MKN – if their love lasted and whether both made it through the First World War, which broke out 11 months later, on Tuesday 4 August.

...How common is tomb raiding? It turns out the archaeologists on the Wari site [a new archaeological find in Cusco, Peru] were right to keep their mouths shut about their discovery. A University of Glasgow project, “Trafficking Culture,” has attempted to document the market for antiquities stolen from archaeological digs. The numbers are huge. Here’s a typical entry from an air-based survey of looting patterns, in this case from sites in the Sahara:

THE desecration of an Aboriginal sacred site in the Northern Territory is a loss of heritage for all Australians, a magistrate says. Magistrate Sue Oliver on Friday found that OM (Manganese) Ltd damaged and desecrated a sacred site known in English as Two Women Sitting Down, at Bootu Creek, about 170km north of Tennant Creek.This is the first desecration conviction in Australia.The company blasted and mined 40 metres away from the site, causing it to collapse in 2011."What has been there for many thousands of years has been lost forever," Ms Oliver said....

A wave of vandalism continued to mar some of Washington’s more popular landmarks Monday with at least three more attractions spattered with green paint, and authorities announced the arrest of a woman near one of the incidents at Washington National Cathedral.The latest crimes occurred three days after the Lincoln Memorial was hit in similar fashion. On Monday, the light-green paint was discovered on an organ in the cathedral’s Bethlehem Chapel, in the cathedral’s Children’s Chapel and on the granite base of a statue next to the Smithsonian Castle on the Mall.D.C. police said Monday evening that they had charged Jiamei Tian, 58, whom they believe to be homeless, with one count of defacing property.The mysterious markings on the statue of Abraham Lincoln blemished one of the country’s most visited attractions and an iconic symbol of freedom. In the cathedral, they tarnished what is widely known as the nation’s house of worship — and a building still under repair after an earthquake two years ago caused such severe damage that it closed for three months....

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. was vandalized overnight.According to NBCWashington, green paint was splattered inside the chamber of the memorial, on Lincoln and on the floor around it.The monument will be closed while National Park Service crews clean up the mess, The Associated Press reported.There's no word yet on who desecrated the monument or what their motive was for doing so....